How lifespan of a praying mantis connects to autumn of your life
Our November day itself is like spring water. It is melted frost, dissolved snow. There is a chill in it and an exhilaration also. The forenoon is all morning and the afternoon all evening. The shadows seem to come forth and to revenge themselves upon the day. The sunlight is diluted with darkness. The colors fade from the landscape, and only the sheen of the river lights up the gray and brown distance.
— John Burroughs
The third week of late fall
The moon, sun and stars On Nov. 23, the Robin Migration Moon becomes the Goose Gathering Moon and reaches lunar perigee (when the Moon is closet to Earth) at 5 p.m. on the 25th
On Nov. 22, the Sun enters its Early Winter sign of Sagittarius. In November’s third week, the rate of increase in the length of the night finally begins to slow to about 10 minutes in seven days instead of 15 minutes. By Nov. 20, however, sunrise time is close to half an hour later than it was on Halloween, and sunset time is just a few minutes from its earliest setting time of the year.
After dark, find Cassiopeia and Cepheus almost overhead between the Milky Way and the North Star. The Big Dipper will lie along the northern horizon. Due south, the scattered star groups of Pisces and Aquarius wander above the tree line, anchored by Fomalhaut.
Weather Trends
This year the Nov. 24th front coincides with a strong moon (new and so close to perigee), a coincidence that suggests this second-last front of the month could be more disruptive than usual during the Thanksgiving period. Chances of an afternoon in the 70s are now only one in one hundred; on March 2, they rise again.
Nov. 25 is the date of the latest recorded killing frost in the Miami Valley.
Zeitgebers: Events in nature that tell the time of year
Euonymus berries split and reveal their orange seeds, beech leaves fall, and winter wheat is often two to four inches tall in the fields. Craneflies are half grown; they become more obvious as some of the few insects out in the cool weather, spinning in the sun.
In a warm fall, spring’s new henbit can be budding. But decorative pear leaves often fall near this date, creating a major change in the urban landscape.
Beech, honeysuckles, boxwood, forsythia, and the strongest of the maples, Osage, pears, and sycamores keep scattered color in the landscape past Thanksgiving. When Early Winter arrives between the 8th and the 15th of December, however, it takes almost all the holdouts.
The first rutting period for deer usually comes to a close this week, lessening the chances that deer will run in front of your car.
In the field and garden
Feed the lawn — fall is a better time than in the spring — the winter’s rain and snow, freezing and thawing will gently work the fertilizer through the soil. Work gypsum into the soil where salt, used to melt winter’s ice, may damage plantings. Mulch the wet perennial beds to prevent drying, January’s heaving, and cold damage.
This is a good time for setting in all your indoor bulbs like amaryllis and paperwhites. If you plant them now, they should grow well as dark moon waxes. The week is also excellent for all livestock maintenance activities, especially worming, vaccinations, crutching and facing ewes, dipping for parasites, and trimming feet.
Mind and body
New moon on the 23rd is likely to increase Seasonal Affective Disorder for people who are having an adverse reaction to the collapse of the leaf canopy. And rheumatism increases as the weather grows colder, often foretelling precipitation; aches and pains may flare up the most at the approach of the Nov. 16 and 20 cold fronts. The S.A.D. Index reflects these issues and more as it climbs steadily throughout the week, reaching a wintry 91 by Nov. 22.
Oh, Age has weary days
And nights of sleepless pain Thou golden time, o’ Youthfu’ prime,
Why comes thou. not again! — From Robert Burns’ “The Winter of Life” 1794
Many years ago, I made friends with an older couple who shared my interest in time and nature. They had me and my wife over for dinner several times, and one evening, the man said to me, “Bill, you are still in the autumn of your life. Just wait until the winter of your life. It is so hard!”
When I asked for details, my host mentioned aches and pains, surgery and the prospect of dying. His wife soon changed the subject to a large and curious praying mantis she had seen at their screen door that summer, the same mantis, she thought, that had come to their door the year before. So we explored the lifespan of the praying mantis instead of her husband’s.
I never discussed the matter with them further, and we eventually lost touch. I think they moved away, and perhaps they have died. Still, most of the leaves have fallen now. And I think about the winter of life.
Tutored by the wise wife, however, my mind wanders to the insects that occasionally visit my back door, and especially to the fifteen Thuja nigra trees (a kind of giant Arborvitae) that I recently bought on sale from a nursery catalog.
The evergreen Thujas, bred to be an imposing and full-bodied, sixty-foot high barrier against the outside world, have somehow colored my future. I wanted to buy them several decades ago to surround the yard with a dense wall of foliage, but I waited until this May to order them. They arrived in the mail, bare root, some of them three inches tall, some about eight inches. Even though they are supposed to grow very quickly, I will have live well past 100 before they achieve my dream. And fifteen won’t be enough. I’ll have to get more.
That should bother me, but it doesn’t. The defiant Thujas will do what they do. Growing recklessly in their pots this winter in my greenhouse, they will form a great barricade of self-deception, an impenetrable distraction (like a praying mantis) to protect me from time and the season.